by Thomas Mann
Male and female voices buzz and hum in conversation, hands are shaken, bows and witticisms are exchanged, and loud, easy laughter is swept up among the columns of the stairway and echoes off the ceiling and the large glass pane of the skylight. Senator Buddenbrook takes up a position, now at the top of the stairs, now at the bay window, to receive all their good wishes—some murmured in serious and formal tones, some blurted cordially and heartily. Mayor Langhals, an elegant stout gentleman with short gray whiskers, the weary gaze of a diplomat, and a clean-shaven chin that he hides in a white cravat, is received with deference on all sides. Consul Eduard Kistenmaker the wine merchant and his wife, née Möllendorpf, along with his brother and partner, Stephen, Senator Buddenbrook’s most faithful supporter and friend, plus the latter’s wife, the extraordinarily healthy daughter of a gentleman farmer, all arrive together. The widow of Senator Möllendorpf sits enthroned in the middle of the sofa—and now her children, Consul August Möllendorpf and his wife, Julie, née Hagenström, enter, offer the obligatory congratulations, and move through the crowd, greeting one and all. His flat nose drooping over his upper lip, Consul Hermann Hagenström has found support for his bulk on the banister and breathes rather heavily into his reddish beard as he chats with Senator Cremer, the chief of police, whose brown whiskers are flecked with gray and frame a smiling face that betrays a certain cunning. Dr. Moritz Hagenström the attorney is also in attendance, accompanied by his beautiful wife, the former Fräulein Puttfarken from Hamburg, and when he smiles some of his pointed gap-teeth show. Visible for a moment is old Dr. Grabow, who clasps Senator Buddenbrook’s right hand in both his own, only to be displaced in the next moment by Voigt the architect. Pastor Pringsheim—in lay dress, his high office suggested only by the length of his frock coat—ascends the stairs with arms spread wide and a perfectly transfigured expression on his face. Even Friedrich Wilhelm Marcus is on hand. Those gentlemen who are official representatives of the senate, the assembly, or the Chamber of Commerce are all dressed in tails. Eleven-thirty—it is getting very hot. The lady of the house withdrew about fifteen minutes ago.
Suddenly they hear the sound of stomping and shuffling in the vestibule downstairs, as if a great many people are crowding into the entrance hall all at once; almost simultaneously a loud, booming voice fills the whole house. Everyone rushes to the landing, thronging the corridor and blocking the doors to the salon, the dining room, and the smoking room, and they all stare in amazement down to where a group of fifteen or twenty men with instruments are arranging themselves around a gentleman with a brown wig, a gray sailor’s beard, and wide-toothed yellow dentures that flash as he shouts each command. What is happening? Consul Peter Döhlmann has marched in with the band from the municipal theater. He mounts the stairs in triumph, waving a stack of programs in his hand.
The band strikes up—and the acoustics are absolutely impossible; all the notes run together, one chord devours the next, making every melody absurd, and dominating everything is the loud growl and grunt of the big bass trumpet, blown by a fat man with a desperate look on his face. The concert offered in honor of the Buddenbrook anniversary begins with a chorale, “Now Thank We All Our God”; this is quickly followed by selections from Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène, and then comes a medley of folk songs. It is a rather extensive musical program.
What a clever idea! They compliment Consul Döhlmann, and no one is inclined to depart until the concert is over. People stand or sit in the salon and out in the corridor, listening and chatting.
Thomas Buddenbrook had joined Stephan Kistenmaker, Senator Gieseke, and Voigt the architect at the back of the stairwell, between the door opening onto the smoking room and the flight of stairs to the third floor. He stood leaning against the wall, contributing a comment to the conversation now and then, but for the most part gazing silently and vacantly out over the banister. The heat had increased and become even more oppressive; but rain was no longer out of the question, because, to judge from the shadows drifting across the skylight, the skies were clouding over. The shadows were moving so rapidly, in fact, one after another, that the almost constant flicker of light in the stairwell hurt his eyes. The bright gilt trim of the plasterwork, the luster of the chandelier, the gleam of the brass instruments below would vanish one moment, only to flash brilliantly the next. Only once did the shadows linger a little longer than usual, and then five, six, seven times, with short pauses in between, there could be heard a soft clatter as something hard struck the skylight—a little hail, no doubt of it. Then sunlight filled the house again from top to bottom.
There is a form of depression in which everything that would normally annoy us and arouse a healthy response of anger, weighs down upon us instead, eliciting only dull, gloomy silence. And so Thomas brooded over the way little Johann had behaved, brooded over his reaction to this whole celebration, and still more over emotions that, try as he would, he was incapable of feeling. Several times he attempted to pull himself together, to put on a cheerful expression, and to tell himself that this was a beautiful day, a day that should only elevate his mood and fill him with joy. But although the sound of the instruments, the confusion of voices, and the sight of all these people jangled on his nerves and merged with memories of the past and his father, calling up a faint wave of emotion, the predominant feeling was a sense that the whole affair was absurd and embarrassing—second-rate music distorted by bad acoustics, banal people engaging in banal conversation about stock prices and banquets. And the blend of sentiment and anger plunged him ever deeper into gloomy despair.
At a quarter after twelve, just as the program of the municipal-theater orchestra was drawing to a close, an event occurred that, although it in no way detracted from or interrupted the general festivities, required the head of the house to leave his guests for reasons of business for a few minutes. There was a pause in the music, and at the same moment up the main stairs came the youngest office apprentice, a short, hunchbacked fellow, who was so terribly embarrassed by all these fine ladies and gentlemen that he tucked his blushing face between his shoulders even farther than necessary and swung one unnaturally long, thin arm in an exaggerated attempt to lend himself a look of nonchalant self-assurance. In the other he held up a folded piece of paper—a telegram. As he ascended the stairs his eyes bounced shyly in all directions, looking for his boss, and when he at last discovered him at the far end of the staircase, he worked his way back through the obstructing crowd, muttering hasty apologies as he went.
His embarrassment was unnecessary, because no one noticed him. Without even seeing him, people went on chatting as they shifted slightly to make room for him to pass, and hardly anyone glanced up to see him bow and present the telegram to Senator Buddenbrook, who then stepped away from Kistenmaker, Gieseke, and Voigt to read it. Even today, although almost all the cables were merely congratulatory, every telegram received during business hours was to be delivered at once, no matter what the circumstances.
At the foot of the stairs to the third floor, the corridor made a little dogleg, passing then along the length of the grand hall to the servants’ stairs, next to which was a side door leading back into the grand hall. Across from the stairs was the door to the shaft of the dumbwaiter that brought food up from the kitchen, and next to it, against the wall, stood a large table, which the housemaid used when she was polishing silver. The senator stopped here, turned his back on the hunchbacked apprentice, and broke open the telegram.
His eyes suddenly grew so wide that anyone watching him would have pulled back in alarm, and he sucked air in a quick, convulsive gasp so violent that his throat dried out instantly and he had to cough.
He managed to say, “That will do.” But his voice was inaudible above the hum of conversation behind them. “That will do,” he said again; only the first two words were actually spoken, the third was a whisper.
The senator did not move, did not turn around, did not give so much as a hint of moving back down the hall, and so the hunchbacke
d apprentice stood there uncertainly for a moment, hesitating, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Then he made another of his bizarre deep bows and started down the servants’ stairs.
Senator Buddenbrook stood there beside the table. He still held the unfolded telegram, his hands hanging limply in front of him. His upper body swayed back and forth as he struggled for air in short, labored breaths through his half-open mouth, and kept rocking his head back and forth, as if he had been struck some incomprehensible blow. “That little bit of hail … that little bit of hail,” he kept repeating pointlessly. Then, however, his breathing grew deeper and more regular, and his body rocked more gently. His half-closed eyes clouded over now—he looked spent, almost broken. And, giving a heavy nod, he turned away.
He opened the door to the grand hall and entered. Slowly, with lowered head, he strode across the polished floor of the spacious room and sat down on one of the dark-red sofas by the window at the far end. It was quiet and cool here. You could hear the fountain splashing in the garden, a fly was buzzing against the windowpane, and only a dull murmur came from the front of the house.
He laid his exhausted head against the cushion and closed his eyes. “It’s better this way, it’s better this way,” he muttered to himself; and then, with a sigh, he said it again, content and relieved: “It really is better this way.”
He lay there for five minutes; his body relaxed, and a peaceful expression spread over his face. Then he sat up, folded the telegram, slipped it in his breast pocket, and stood up to return to his guests.
But at that same moment he sank back down onto the sofa, groaning in disgust. The music, the music was starting up again—what an idiotic racket. It was supposed to be a galop, with drum and cymbals to accentuate the strong rhythm, but the other, muddled masses of sound were out of sync, either ahead or behind—a brassy, jangling, insufferable, naïve hullabaloo of growls, blasts, and twitters, and, above it all, the mad fitful tootles of the piccolo.
6
OH, BACH! Sebastian Bach, dear madam!” cried Herr Edmund Pfühl, the organist of St. Mary’s, pacing the salon in great excitement, while Gerda sat at the piano, smiling, her chin propped in one hand, and Hanno listened to it all from an armchair, one knee clasped in both hands. “Most assuredly, as you’ve said, it was he who gained the victory for harmony over counterpoint. He was the creator of modern harmony, most assuredly. But by what means? Need I tell you the means? By developing counterpoint even further—you know it as well as I. And what was the driving principle behind that development? Harmony? Oh no, certainly not. But counterpoint itself, madam. Counterpoint! And to what, I ask you, would mere experimentation with harmony have led? I must warn you—as long as I have a tongue to speak—I must warn you of mere experimentation with harmony.”
He was passionate about such matters, and he gave his passion free rein, for he felt quite at home here in the salon. Every Wednesday afternoon, this large, square-built man, who carried his shoulders a little too high, would appear on the threshold in his coffee-brown swallowtail coat that fell below the hollows of his knees, and as he waited for his musical partner he would lovingly open the Bechstein grand piano, arrange the violin parts on the carved music stand, and play a brief, light, tasteful prelude, resting his head contentedly first on one shoulder, then the other.
A tangle of tight little curls, an amazing growth of fox-brown hair flecked with gray, made his head seem unusually large and massive, although he held it poised nicely above his turndown collar—at the end of a long neck with a very large Adam’s apple. His unkempt, bushy mustache was the same color as his hair and stuck out farther than his stump of a nose. Little puffy bags of skin hung beneath his round brown eyes—which usually sparkled, but turned dreamy when he played, his gaze apparently resting somewhere beyond the point on which they were fixed. There was nothing impressive about his face; at least, it showed no obvious mark of a strong and alert intelligence. His eyelids were usually half lowered, and often, without parting his lips, he would involuntarily let his clean-shaven chin go limp, which gave his mouth the soft, deeply secretive, stupid, abandoned look of a man cradled in sweet slumber.
This softness of the external man, however, contrasted sharply with the rigor and dignity of his character. Edmund Pfühl was a widely admired organist, and his reputation as a scholar of counterpoint was not confined within the walls of his hometown. He had published a little book on the function of musical keys in sacred music, and it was recommended for use in private instruction by two or three conservatories; his fugues and variations on chorales were played here and there, wherever organs resounded to the glory of God. These compositions, as well as the voluntaries to which he treated the congregation of St. Mary’s on Sunday, were impeccable, flawless—and filled with the inexorable, imposing dignity and moral logic of the “austere style.” All earthly beauty was alien to them, for they left untouched the ordinary human emotions of the layman. What spoke out of them, what triumphed within them, was technique as an ascetic religion—virtuosity for its own sake, holy in and of itself. Edmund Pfühl had little use for music that pleases, and, to be frank, he spoke disdainfully of beautiful melodies. But, puzzling though it may seem, he was not a dry, petrified pedant. “Palestrina!” he would say—and his face would turn dogmatic and terrifying. But in the next moment as he deftly executed a series of archaistic phrases, his expression was all sheer frailty, ecstasy, and rapture, and his eyes would come to rest in some holy, distant place, as if he saw in his work the ultimate conclusion of all human enterprise. This was his musician’s gaze, which looked vague and empty, but only because it was caught up in a logic that was deeper, purer, more unsullied and uncompromised than the logic that shapes the ideas and thoughts embodied in language.
His hands were large, soft, seemingly boneless, and heavily freckled—and when he greeted Gerda Buddenbrook as she drew back the portieres and entered the salon, his voice would be soft and hollow, almost as if something were stuck in his throat. “Your servant, madam,” he would say.
Rising slightly from his seat at the piano and respectfully lowering his head to the hand she offered him, he brought his left hand down on the firm, clear chords of a fifth, whereupon Gerda picked up her Stradivarius and quickly tuned the strings with a practiced ear.
“The Bach G-minor Concerto, Herr Pfühl. It seems to me that the whole adagio is still rather unsatisfactory.”
And the organist began to play. But on most occasions, no sooner would he strike the first few chords than the door to the corridor would slowly, cautiously open and little Johann would soundlessly steal his way across the carpet and take a seat in an armchair. There he would sit very quietly, one knee clasped in both hands, and listen: both to the music and to what was said.
“Well, Hanno, come to snitch a little music?” Gerda said when they came to a pause, letting her glance drift his way—her close-set, shadowy eyes now radiant and moist from the music.
Then he stood up and bowed silently, extending a hand to Herr Pfühl, who let his hand pass gently and lovingly across Hanno’s hair, which lay in soft, graceful curls along his brow and at his temples.
“And now listen, my boy,” he said, with mild but firm emphasis. All the while, the child was shyly watching the way the organist’s Adam’s apple rose whenever he spoke. But then he quickly and quietly returned to his chair, as if he could hardly wait for the music and conversation to continue.
They played a movement of Haydn, a few pages of Mozart, a Beethoven sonata. Then, while Gerda was searching for some music, her violin under her arm, the most startling thing happened: Herr Pfühl, Edmund Pfühl, the organist of St. Mary’s, who had been playing a casual interlude, gradually drifted into a very strange style, while a kind of embarrassed joy lit his faraway gaze. And from under his fingers came a swelling, blossoming, interweaving melody, from which arose in elegant counterpoint—at first only sporadic, but then ever more clear and vigorous—a great, old-fashioned, wonderful, and grandi
ose march, which moved toward a climax, intertwining, modulating, and finally resolving as the violin entered fortissimo. The overture to Meistersinger marched past.
Gerda Buddenbrook was a passionate admirer of this new music. But it had aroused such savage, outraged opposition in Herr Pfühl that in the beginning she had doubted she would ever win him over to it.
On the day when she had first laid the piano arrangements from Tristan and Isolde on his music stand and begged him to play it for her, he had leapt to his feet after twenty-five measures and, exhibiting every sign of utmost disgust, begun to pace back and forth between the bay window and the piano.
“I won’t play this, madam. I am your most obedient servant, but I will not play it. That is not music, please believe me—and I’ve always presumed I know a little something about music. It is pure chaos! It is demagoguery, blasphemy, and madness! It is a fragrant fog with thunderbolts. It is the end of all morality in the arts. I will not play it!” And with these words he had thrown himself back on his seat and, amid coughs and gulps, while his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, managed another twenty-five measures, only to slam the piano shut and shout, “Shame, shame! No, good God in heaven, this is going too far. Forgive me, madam, for speaking so candidly. You do me great honor, and have paid me for my services for many a year now—and I am a man of modest circumstances. But if you force me to play such wickedness, I shall resign from my post—I shall do without it. And think of the child, the child sitting there in his chair. He stole in here quietly to hear music—do you wish to poison his mind for good and all?”